Back when we had 13 channels, Mom used to say: "Don't sit so close,you'll ruin your eyes." I wonder what she'd say about the Internet...

Monday, June 20, 2011

Local Newspaper Experiments with Crowdsourcing in News Cafe

Can a local paper really get the community involved in the process of creating local news? If you ask John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Co, the answer might be "yes." Mr. Paton was the keynote speaker at the 10th International Newsroom Summit held last week in Zurich, Switzerland, where he discussed about the company's "news cafe" experiment in Torrington, CT....

In this short recap of the conference, we get little info about the keynote (ok, it's a *short* recap, I know) other than repetition of the axiom (platitude?) "The crowd knows more than we do. . ."

Yadda, yadda, yadda....

I wonder, really, how well the experiment is working, if the "crowd" is really stepping up, and how the newsroom folks are handling the "crowd"....

Crowdsourced journalism isn't an easy thing to do, and the quality of the news can be affected by the quality of the crowd. If the crowd is doing newsgathering, and thus contributing to the news in some way, that would be innovative...but...

One of the biggest problems with doing anything "crowd" is managing said crowd. In order to achieve success, there needs to be good community guidelines and management. The Register Citizen folks held a meeting in December 2010 to discuss comment approval guidelines. A very good discussion--esp. on the bit of not saying anything bad about businesses--appears in the comments to the post...

So, that's a good start, but I wonder where it went from there?? (any Register Citizen folks, please feel free to leave a comment....)

I also wonder if anyone at the Register Citizen read up on the subject of online community management, and, perhaps, informed the folks at the meeting that there are a great number of resources out there to help them develop suitable guidelines...

We don't need to re-invent the wheel here, folks. There's solid scholarship on online communities. Please, don't leave the public in the dark to fumble around and figure it out for themselves. IMO, there's something both unethical and dishonest when that's done.

2 comments:

First of all, I think Torrington's such an interesting example of an "open newsroom" and partnering with your audience because we are such a small, community daily newspaper. We don't have layers of editors and bureaucrats with time to sit around and ponder the future of journalism. We scramble to figure out who's going to cover this weekend's high school graduation ceremony.

What we've tried to do is build a foundation on which to build, from the physical layout of our newsroom, to the "Fact Check" box that we put at the bottom of every story on the web, to transparency about how we develop policies and make decisions about news coverage.

From there, it's a learning process, both for our staff and our audience. Our openness has greatly increased the number and diversity of sources of information for our reporting. And it has greatly increased the number and quality of people we get steering us toward better accuracy when we report something that is wrong or that lacks proper context.

We're excited about where we can go from here incorporating crowdsourcing in our reporting. We recently established a full-time curator position to help us sift through and present to readers the tremendous amount of information that is being reported by the audience itself via blogs and social media.

Regarding that meeting about story comment approval guidelines, here is information on one followup that has taken place since then:

John Paton and members of JRC's advisory board, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Emily Bell, held an "open meeting" in Torrington, in which several dozen community leaders and readers attended. A large chunk of that conversation centered around the story comment issue.

If you have any other questions, we'd be happy to respond, and if you have any other thoughts, we'd love to hear them. One of the aspects of our new office in Torrington is a classroom built right into the newsroom. That's not just a symbolic statement about our willingness to learn. It's a necessity for a newspaper and an industry that need to change rapidly to a digital first operation. We have to learn, from CEO to publisher to reporter, a brand new set of skills.

Would love to come down and have a chat with you about the News Cafe, what's going on there, etc. Also very glad to hear you've hired a full-time curator. Curation at the level you need it is something that can't necessarily be left to everyone else to do.

Overall, though, it's good to see how the C-R is embracing contribution from the "community" and not seeing the community as adversaries. That alone is fantastic progress!